Atheist from Belgium

Just thought I'd stop by and say hi. I'm a 17-year-old (well, almost 18) atheist from Belgium. My name is Mathieu, but since you Americans have trouble with them French names you can say Matt or Matthew!

I've been an atheist for basically all my life: when my religion teacher started talking to us kids (age 9 or something) about Jewish preachers resurrecting and turning water into wine my mind kinda went "This is just a story" and I never actually paid much attention to it until I figured out that there were lots of people who actually took this stuff seriously. I always smiled and nodded politely whenever people told me about prayer or divine intervention in their life while secretly wondering what the hell they were talking about.
One night in early high school however, I decided to buy into it and (after a rough couple of days at school) I prayed. I think I prayed for about two nights in a row but on night 3 I went "This is the most asinine retarded thing I've ever done in my life. Who am I kidding?"
My nonbelief consolidated when I got my hands on the God Delusion a couple of years ago. That's also when I started identifying myself as an atheist and becoming really interested in the topic.

Now we're a couple of years down the road, I'm turning 18 and currently in my second year Civil Engineering at Ghent University, and a student of science, scepticism and history. And still I'm completely baffled yet intrigued by widespread religious belief.

I heard about this site on the Chariots of Iron podcast (and if you aren't listening to those guys, you're missing out!) and I'm joining here hoping to find a community of like-minded invididuals and learn a thing or two from other nontheists around the world ;)

Replies to This Discussion

Hey Matt! I'm a life-long atheist myself. There's a huge atheist community on Youtube. You should check it out.
I plan on taking electrical engineering courses sometime in the future, to prepare for a career in neuroscience. I'm also intrigued by this mass placebo we humans call "god". It irritates me, so I figure that I can help the human race move past this need for an invisible imaginary skydaddy by understanding and working with the brain.

As for Biblical history, well I've been a history geek for as long as I remember and Ancient history has always been the field I'm most interested in. In my Catholic school we were also taught about modern scholarship on the Bible, which I found very interesting (as well as surprising, since Catholics are pretty indifferent about things like the Q document or the fact that Mark was copied by both Luke and Matthew, even though these things are tantamount to heresy in most Protestant circles).

But my real interest in New Testament historicity came when I read the Da Vinci code several years ago, and pretty much bought the line of the story hook line and sinker since it all sounded so right. Soon thereafter I found myself on Internet fora peddling Dan Brown's poorly researched crap, until someone with a better grasp of the material came along and set me straight (aka kicked my ass for being uncritical enough to accept it).

That experience was very formative for me and taught me a lot, namely that just because you succeeded in debunking religion, doesn't mean anything anti-religious you read is automatically true - and more generally, just because you became an atheist or started thinking rationally about one topic, doesn't mean you are suddenly immune to wishful thinking and mistaking emotional appeal from intellectual consistency.

So that's when I set out to learn more about how Christianity really formed, what we know about the New Testament and what sources it contains, as well as other topics related to religion and atheism; did Christianity cause the Dark Ages, etcetera.

And second, I've learned a lot about the New Testament because -despite being sometimes called a Christian apologist because I debunk some of the cheaper and dumber historical arguments against Christianity- I've come to realise that some of the best arguments against Christianity are to be found in historical analysis.

All in all I think I've been reading about Biblical history for about four or five years. But not continuously, obviously, just as one of the topics I'm interested in.

Matt, your journey through religious history probably presents many more questions than answers, at least that is what happened to me. However, because I, too, come from traditional Roman Catholic background, I latched onto anti-religious materials and found them coming up short.

Your question, "did Christianity cause the Dark Ages," intrigues me as well. What have you discovered?

Matt - I think we all have a story mottled with irrational beginnings - nothing to have shame about - the happy ending is that you have learnt how to follow the rational thought strategy - I realise now that the only way we can evolve our thinking is to expose it and hope that someone steps in to provide some rational education.....

Matt, good for you! You have a bright future being able to shed superstition and take on life with a realistic eye that there is no god out there, there are no miracles, and there is no "Promised Land". Keep your focus and hopefully you won't have the bumps in life's road put there by mystical/magical thinking.

My ancestry is Belgian, Denoo, from Brugge and small towns around there. I love the countryside where our relatives live and visited several times. I am a 75+ year old, little, pudgy woman with snow white hair. If you are like my grandfather who came from Ruddervord, and father who both had thick black hair that turned snow white and they never got bald.

I live in Gits/Roeselare, which is like 10 miles from Ruddervoorde tops. Not aware of any Denoo's in my group of friends though ;)

As for the thing about the Dark Ages, well it was more of a tongue in cheek reference to graphs like these, which a friend of mine dubbed "The stupidest thing on the Internet". There's a certain group of people who have tried to project current religious opposition to science (like the creationist movement) back onto the past to say that this dynamic has always existed in equal force: the old Conflict Thesis. Even though Wikipedia can tell you it is now discarded by most academics, it's still quite popular outside of it.

I think religion and science are ultimately not "compatible" with each other (as Sam Harris put it, there is no way believing things for good reasons is compatible with believing things for bad reasons) but the idea that there has always been fierce opposition is somewhat outdated.